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Kenyan Police Arrest Masten Wanjala, Who They Say Confessed to Killing at Least 10 Children

Detectives in Nairobi arrested the 20-year-old over two missing schoolboys from Shauri Moyo; police said he admitted killing at least ten children over five years.

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Kenyan detectives arrested a 20-year-old man in Nairobi on Wednesday, July 14, 2021, over the disappearance of two schoolboys from Shauri Moyo, and by that night the Directorate of Criminal Investigations was saying he had admitted killing at least ten children over five years. The DCI named him as Masten Milimo Wanjala. Some reports spelled his middle name Milimu.

The boys were Charles Opindo Bala, 13, and Junior Mutuku Musyoki, 12, both pupils at Sagaret Primary School in Majengo. Charles disappeared on June 30, at about 7:30 in the evening, while he was playing outside the shop his father, Tony Opindo, kept. Junior vanished on July 7. He had left school at 4 p.m. and joined his friends on an open field, and his mother, Felista Wayua, never heard from him again. She reported him missing that day and went from one police station to the next looking for him.

Then the messages began. Tony Opindo received a text from an unknown number demanding 30,000 shillings for his son's release. He sent 2,000, he told the Nation, after the caller said there was no food for the evening, and the demands kept coming. Felista Wayua was told that unless she sent 50,000 shillings, her son would be taken to Tanzania. Detectives told the Nation that the same phone number had been used against both families.

Wanjala led detectives to Gitaruru, in Kabete, where the DCI said he had dumped the bodies of the two boys. Felista Wayua was called to the City Mortuary in Nairobi, and there she identified her son.

The DCI's account, posted on Twitter that evening, went far beyond the two boys. It said Wanjala had walked detectives through a string of killings going back five years, and that he had kept a record of them by date. It named the first victim as Purity Maweu, a 12-year-old girl it said he abducted from Kiima Kimwe in Machakos. It described a 13-year-old boy identified only as Aron, killed three years later in Kamukuywa, Kimilili, in western Kenya, whose death set off protests in which residents burned the house of a person they suspected. Two more boys, the DCI said, had been lured from Kitengela and Mlolongo, strangled and left in a sewer line, and their bodies had not been found.

Detectives said every victim had been stupefied with a white substance, in powder or liquid form, before being killed. The statement claimed he had sometimes sucked blood from his victims' veins, and it called him a "bloodthirsty vampire." He was unapologetic, the DCI said, and told detectives he took pleasure in the killings.

Police called the arrest a major breakthrough in a wave of child disappearances across Kenya, almost two a day in recent weeks by their figures, AFP reported. DCI Director George Kinoti said Wanjala would be charged in court once the investigation was complete. The next day, a Nairobi court ordered him held for 30 days so that police could keep working.

What the record does and does not say. Everything here about the killings beyond the two boys comes from police, and from what police said Wanjala told them. He was never charged, tried or convicted: he escaped from custody in October 2021 and was killed by a mob in Bungoma County before he took a plea. The count was never settled; the DCI said at least ten, and the Nation reported a confession to at least thirteen. Accounts of the arrest differ too. The DCI said he was arrested on July 14, while the Nation reported that detectives from Buruburu Police Station picked him up the evening before. The DCI said he was barely 16 at the first killing; other reports of his statements put him at 15. Junior's surname also appears as Musyoka.

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